Swords sandals and togas : the cinematic imaginary and the tourist experiences of Roman heritage sites

Abstract

This chapter is an exploration and meditation about some aspects of the imagination as it applies to the ways in which certain iconic heritage sites are visualised. It takes seriously the power of the imagination in visitor engagement and in the 'dialogue' that is established when the visitor encounters material culture that has already been marked out as both 'heritage' and 'historical'. In particular, the spotlight is on material culture that is overdetermined by the sheer density of representations under the descriptor of 'Ancient Rome'. The proposition is thus. There operates a type of heritage iconography when it comes to certain sites and certain periods of history: for example, ancient Rome and ancient Greece, Medieval Europe, Feudal China, eighteenth century aristocratic and revolutionary Europe, especially France, nineteenth century rural and urban European landscapes and various twentieth century war sites. The tourist brings to the encounter/production of place a strong set of mental images and associations that, in a sense, 'give life' to the materiality and distinctly lifeless forms of ruined buildings, crumbling walls, traces of road or remnants of the past now dwarfed by subsequent urban developments. In the case of ancient Rome, the tourist (seemingly marked neither by geography nor culture in a globalised economy) carries in their imagination a strong image of life in the time of the Romans. Imagination and memory, of course, are intimately connected (McGinn 2004), but the focus here is not on memory per se, but on the visual repertoire that memory conjures. The cinema is a particularly rich archive for the evolution of a heritage iconography although it is, of course, not the only one. Museum objects, illustrated histories, television documentaries, paintings, computer games, photography, Google images, descriptions in historical novels and in histories (etc.) all contribute to what has become a standardised and profoundly ahistorical and ageographical set of images about life in ancient Rome. My particular interest is cinematic representations (including television series) because cinematic virtual worlds are complete in a way that archaeological sites never can be. And these virtual worlds feed the tourist imagination